Look inside me. Claudia Groza.
October 04 - 27, 2022
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________
CONCEPTUAL FIGURATIVE BY Claudia Groza.
Vultus est index animi. It's said that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. But it is only partly true. It would be more correct to say, especially in the era of representationism crisis and dual oppositions, that the whole body of a person is the embodiment of his inner world, because the body and soul are the same things. Internal and external are one whole.
Claudia Groza, a modern artist working in the conceptual figurative genre, in her series with the distinctive title "Look inside me" conducts a study of the visuality, physicality and body memory. She offers her own point of view on the actual philosophical problem through painting. In this cycle, the artist keeps her own nature and unique style - subtle, intelligent, restrained and refined, refusing complicated allegories and using simple language of universal symbols.
As well as the other works of the artist, paintings from this series are performative and full of action even more than ever. “Hold”, “Look inside me”, “Let's run”, “We gonna fly tomorrow”! They induce to look, they require exploring, intensifying the very act of seeing and changing sight trajectory, so: "look at" becomes "look into". Embodying her ontology of the inexpressible, Claudia refers to the human body manifestations and captures the body in variety of its states and poses: in static and dynamic, standing, sitting and lying down, while playing, running and sleeping. The artist, without secret, admires the female body perfection which undoubtedly correlate with everything that transcends body limits.
The "catalog" of spontaneous gestures reveals the fluidity and permeability of reality: bodies dissolve in the surrounding objects, volumetric forms gradually transform into lines on the plane surface and imperceptibly disappear. Adjacency to material objects (paper airplanes and balls of different sizes) does not reveal their strictly material nature, but, on the contrary, reminds surrealistic paintings, which leave a full scope for imagination. Thus, the equivalence of the human and non-human is affirmed.
The author takes bodies out of the routine space-time continuum and places them in the hidden world of games, imagination and art. Depicted closely or super closely at the empty or semi-empty space background, her female characters attract attention. You want to look inside their inner world in the usual way, but they, being immersed in their own reality, defiantly turn away, escaping the view. The artist himself also joins the game with the voyeuristic audience. The impossibility to look in the eyes only boosts beholder's curiosity, making him lose his usual power over the image.
At the same time, the bodies are not presented in dominant positions and are mostly "caught by surprise" - in the process of game or sleeping deep, when the ratio loses its control omnipotence. The artist captures human body in its naturalness, at the moment of greatest vulnerability, weakness, even defeat (as it is seen in the picture "The Party"). Her works also provide the place for pain - a feeling that's normally repressed and socially disapproved. But body memory is most actively formed especially through pain, forming, in turn, memory of the soul. The metaphor of threads captures the lack of freedom and possible stress. The artwork "Compromise" represents a good visual solution for illustrating the pain-pleasure dichotomy.
Fragmented physicality, which exists as a system of responses to all kinds of external stimuls, turns out to be the "spatial history" of the person. Claudia Groza succeeds to capture and extend the present as much as possible, in order to assemble the image of the soul or per se subjectivity from separate moments and body reality pictures.
